There has been a lot of interesting, insightful and intelligent discourse on the iPad over the past 5 days. Much of which has been provided by people who have not even seen this device in ‘the flesh’.
I can appreciate thoughts such as this one provided by Fraser Speirs in his piece titled, “Future Shock”:
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.
And Craig Hockenberry soothes the nerves of my over-stimulated inner child — who simply wants to create and is angry and frustrated with the adult me who tinkers way too much — with this thought:
There’s an inherent benefit to only doing one thing at a time: the load of worrying about other tasks is lifted. Knowing that there isn’t anything else competing for your attention is quite liberating.
Many people have spent some quality time thinking about the future over these few short days and have penned some truly great thoughts. And for the most part, I’m on board.
But …
There is one small issue that worries me. I’m more than happy that Apple is stripping the idea of the personal computer down to the essentials. I want my parents, my grandmother, and every other extended family member to be able to just do what they need to do. I want that for myself at times.
The move to touch computing is another aspect of the future that I do not fear. It’s not here yet — for me at least — simply because I cannot yet do my job on iPad 1.0. But I have no doubt that it’s coming and so far I’m simply grasping to somehow get a firm picture of what that might look like. But at the end of the day, I’ll leave that to Jobs and Apple, who for the last decade, have shown so much more propensity for vision than I have. Or anyone else.
No, my issue merely lies somewhere on the fringe of one of the discussion points that has been debated this past week: the closed nature of the iPhone/iPad infrastructure. On this point, some good points were made on both sides. And while I appreciate the perspective by those who debated that the closed nature of this platform is indeed better for all of us, one question repeats itself in my ears:
It’s the community that first attracted me to the Mac platform and OS X. And it’s this community that provides the majority of the software that I use to do my job every day. I fear that if Apple continues their strong arming of these developers, some (or many) of them will eventually go elsewhere.
At this point, the signs are pointing to these very developers being excited about the potential of the iPad. But that’s easy now, while the excitement is high and the news fresh. I only hope it’s enough to keep these devs satisfied if Apple continues their inane rejections of App Store submissions.
But there is hope. As internet racountere John Gruber recently stated:
Developers go where the users are.
And the momentum that Apple started in the century’s first decade appears to be rolling strong, at the expense of vendors selling Microsoft PC’s or crappy mobile phones.
At this point, there’s not really anywhere else for the great developers to go (Linux users, you know this is true). But I hope that Apple improves the entire App Store situation, rather than hope that a lack of better alternatives keeps the great developers from leaving.
It’s the community that makes this platform strong. And if Apple plans to move the Mac lineup into this closed framework along with the iPhone and iPad, I want to see the community follow.
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chrisbowler writes...it. Excitement about computers being simpler
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Nightmare Hasn’t Gone Away
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